Microsoft's Emergency Windows 11 Update Arrives To Fix Recovery Failures

A few unfortunate users of the Windows 11 October 2025 update (and Windows Server 2025) may have stumbled upon a critical issue where the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) failed to pick up mouse or keyboard input—but thankfully, Microsoft has finally released a patch fixing the issue. Well, to a point, anyway...if you were actually impacted by this issue, chances are high that you can't actually boot back into Windows to install the update yet, since the Windows Recovery Environment, unless triggered manually, emerges if something is stopping you from entering Windows normally. In that scenario, where you're still dealing with the worst of this issue and you can't install the OS update to fix it, what can you do?

Microsoft officially recommends the below workarounds for users unable to apply the update:

• Use a touchscreen keyboard to navigate WinRE, if you have a touch-enabled Windows computer.
• Switch to PS/2 mouse or keyboard input to navigate WinRE, though most modern machines simply don't have these legacy input ports anymore.
• Reboot into Windows RE from a previously-created USB recovery drive. This is the ideal solution, since the USB recovery drive should fix the USB input problems, but if you don't already have one in hand you'll likely need to create one at, say, a library or a friend's house.
• Finally, OEMs and enterprises are pointed toward using exclusive Windows enterprise features to fix the problem. This includes using the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) in Configuration Manager, or deploying push-button reset features via Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) and Windows Preinstallation Environment add-on.

Hopefully, impacted users are able to utilize one of the workaround methods to get back to using their Windows 11 PCs soon. The existence and subsequent squashing of this bug does raise some questions, though— like how did Microsoft even break USB input for the Windows Recovery Environment? It thankfully didn't take very long for Microsoft to fix the problem, but it's still a rather oblique issue to be dealing with on a mainstream Windows operating system.

Truthfully, bugs like these are all the more reason I recommend users wait as long as possible to apply operating system or driver updates in all but the most critical of situations—because if the patch isn't tested enough to remove these problems, you become the tester just by staying up-to-date. If you work on your PC, potential days or more of downtime simply aren't worth the risk. And some fixes are taking longer than others to roll out—at time of writing, Localhost is still broken on Windows 11.

Image Credit: Tomek on Pixabay